Web 2.0 experiences

I have really been slacking lately with my blog, so I have a lot to write. Currently, I am taking teaching writing in the classroom and as part of our assignment we had to start a Twitter account. I have always been vehemently against having a twitter account. What is twitter's purpose except to over inform people about your life? I think I am stuck in between wanting to be hooked up with the rest of the world and wanting to break free. My husband and I constantly talk about posting pictures of the girls in facebook. I get annoyed when every picture is posted, but this is besides the point. Part of our assignment is we need to make 8 tweets regarding the topic we discussed in class in only 140 characters. The character limitation is harder than I expected, I guess I am long winded. In class, we talk about the benefits of twitter and a teacher who uses it currently. This woman is a social studies teacher, he students are only allowed to follow news twitter accounts and tweet an article they found interesting or important. Slowly, I am warming to the idea of twitter. Once this class is over I will still delete the account. I have this nasty habit of getting sucked into Facebook, the last thing I need is another social networking site acquiring my time.


In this other class of mine, we need to develop a workshop that we then turn into a video. I have been exploring Photostory, Garage Band and iMovie. Our video needs to have voice over, which Photostory allows you to record on each page. You are also able to take a PowerPoint and save the slides as jpegs, which you could then import each slide into your Photostory. Garage Band allows you to record voice and then the user can import the music file into iMovie. I have never used any of these programs, so I am still unsure what I will use. I will update you on how it goes.


Last week during our group project we used Wordle for the first time, well most of our first time (to see my wordle <a href=http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5387537/jackiewojtak> click here </a>). We learned that unless you have some words more than once, all the words will be the same size. To make our Wordle look the way we wanted it to, we typed the important word, like our motto and names, multiple times. We also learned from a group member to save what we wrote in the text box. If for some reason we did not like how the Wordle came out, then clicked the back but, we would lose all our text. I could see how this would work better if you had students take a short essay they wrote and type it into Wordle. The words they mentioned most would be the largest, these words would hopefully be the important topics in their essay. Our group meeting went well, we were only able to meet through Skype chat unfortunately. Technology was not cooperating that day. Hopefully this week will be better. We are going to try to use WiZiQ. I'll let you know how it goes. More tomorrow, I promise.